Mp4 Download causes browser to play file instead of download

Question

In my website I stream users mp4 content. I also allow users to download. However in Chrome it seems to automatically play the file in an internal player instead of download

Answer 1

You can get it done in a couple of ways. I'm not sure you use IIS or apache and which server side language you are using, but the techniques are similar for all.

You can add the MIME type application/octect-stream to the extension .mp4 in your IIS or apache, sothat all files with extension .mp4 will be shown with a download prompt. This is the most easy and sure fire way of showing the "download" prompt.

Plz see the example below.

http://www.codingstaff.com/learning-center/other/how-to-add-mime-types-to-your-server

In the above example, instead of setting video/mp4 fpr .mp4 extensions, change it to application/octect-stream

Also, the same can be done via server side code as well, (PHP code). The code will be similar with ASP.NET also,please google for "force file download"

$file_url = 'http://www.myremoteserver.com/file.mp4';
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: Binary"); 
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . basename($file_url) . "\""); 
readfile($file_url);